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Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Obenieta: While you may
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak
Only the dead would take things sitting down. So there’s really nothing jolting about protesters standing up to their fiery slogans until the object of their disaffection would lie cold among candles and funereal flowers.
In the heat of their rage, the rallyists might as well emblazon their placards with the President’s blood. Seeing red is the right of the benighted, isn’t it? In the meantime, let the din of their disquiet lull us—grin and bear it—into thinking that’s how they stay alive and kicking.
See, they won’t be caught dead lolling their sweet time as if life in this tropical nook of the Third World were a beach. Talk about finding their proverbial place under the sun, and the protesters at least do walk their words. Yes, unlike many of us who can only seethe in silence. Or wilt in the summer of our discontent.
Little deaths more often come in the heels of our helplessness, despond and doubt we carry like mountains. And so we go about shrugging it all off, going the way of the stoic whose cool nonchalance makes it appear like it’s utterly Greek to grit one’s teeth or flail one’s arms at Fate.
Rotten governance, greed and corruption, hunger and mayhem—these and more awful realities are nothing new under the sun. But the same holds true to the seasons’ insistence to keep the recurring cliché of its cycle and passage. As if dropping hints along the way for us to follow through the flux: Death is merely as temporary as the colors in a peacock’s feathers or the dust of dried-up petals. Nothing’s final yet.
That may explain why some find purpose, if not beauty, in ventilating all things ugly and unfair about the world ‘til hell freezes over. If they’ve not yet turned cold in their “cause-oriented” quarrel with the world, it can be because they’ve not yet given up the possibility of finding a cosmos out of chaos.
Rage as long as there’s still time, yes. Or as a poet once exhorted: “Gather ye rosebuds while you may.”
Recently, it has become futile to overlook Death. An acquaintance succumbed to bullet wounds and another died of leukemia. A colleague at work has just been diagnosed with liver cancer. I should be seeing black butterflies, if I were superstitious.
But just as conspicuous in our modest garden at home, buffeted by the mountain breeze dispelling the sweltering weather, are the Mardi Gras of butterflies. I could have heard the sound of my own breathless witnessing, except that it’s impossible to ignore my wife’s voice and two children immoderate with squeals of either delight or edginess.
Although it’s a long time coming, Maytime will hold its ground yet against the constancy of the dead and the dying.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (May 2, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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